Photograph by Pol Malacara, via Flickr.
Is there any number in sports more evocative than the number 10 of a soccer jersey? Pele wore it and immortalized it; Maradona, Zidane, Platini, Ruud Gullit, Roberto Baggio all wore it, too, on the national level. And this summer Messi and Kaka, to name just two, will don the famous number for Argentina and Brazil.
What is it about this number and its magic? Is there any comparison in American sports—say to the number 12 of an NFL quarterback? Michael Jordan’s classic number 23? Dr. J’s Afro-era 32? Well, for the most part, these are numbers associated with specific players; but soccer’s number 10 is a sort of transcendent number, a signifying number. Soccer jerseys, originally, were assigned according to position, moving up from the defenders to strikers. That’s why, for example, you’ll see that a player like Manchester United and Northern Ireland’s swinging-60s star Georgie Best wore different numbers in different games, as he was switched around the playing field. (Today, of course, you have all sort of odd-ball numbers, like Ronaldinho’s 80 for AC Milan and Mario Balotelli’s 45 for Inter.)But the number 10 means something beyond the individual player and even beyond the demands of the position. It represents the team’s star—but that’s a shallow way to put it. It represents the team’s heart and soul, its inspiration, its creative mastermind (and not necessarily just its top scorer). In Italy, the player is called the fantasista, “the fantasist”—it’s a dreamy role, a lofty one; one that requires vision, imagination, an inventive mind and the skills to go with it. Francesco Totti was a number 10 for Italy, though sadly no longer. Gennaro Gattuso, on the other hand, will never be a number 10. His role is completely different: he’s a midfield enforcer, an escort or blocker, for the number 10. (I remember an Italian teammate once telling me that “of all the virtues of Italian soccer, Gattuso has none!”)
As for the Brazilians, the number 10s are legion: Pele, Zico, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, and now Kaka. Brazilian soccer, in fact, seems to pivot and swirl—and samba—around the whims of their number 10 more than any other soccer team in history. There is a saying in Brazil, a friend from Rio once explained, that one midfielder’s job is to carry a piano on his back so that another can play beautiful music on it. (Dunga, captain of the 1994 World Cup winning team and Brazil’s present coach, was just that sort of lugger of musical equipment.)
So as I prepare to have my eyes naturally follow the number 10s of this summer’s World Cup, I already feel the excitement, the joy, the alegria, of waiting for genius to be unbound. It is a wonderful thing. The world could use more number 10s. When our son was born last June, a friend in Berlin sent a very sweet message: “Welcome to the new number 10.” But who knows what number he’ll wear in the end. I always fancied myself more of a 5 or 6, in the libero tradition of Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto.